Remembrance of Things I Forgot: A Novel Read online

  As we waited for the 6 train, Junior’s brief spell of levity faded. “Who’s my first grade teacher?” he asked.

  “Miss Chalmers.”

  His mouth fell open.

  “Fourth grade?”

  “Mr. Brophy.”

  “Fifth grade?”

  “Mrs. Bodkin.”

  “Name my friends in high school.”

  “John Silecky, Vic Soucise, David Tomaselli, Tom Papia, Bruce Burns, Matt Kozlowski, and Donny Damon.”

  We boarded the train, and several heads turned when he asked, “Where’d I jerk off for the first time?”

  “In my bedroom when it was painted that electric blue color. I was thinking about Kirk Garcia.”

  “How do you know these things?”

  “I told you.”

  “Would you believe your story if you were me?”

  “No. I’d think I was nuts.” I was conscious of my wallet in my back pocket and reached for it. “I have my driver’s license.” I pulled out the license and Junior examined it carefully.

  “It expires in 2009. And what’s this shiny stuff ?”

  Junior was referring to the holographic image of the state seal of New York.

  He seemed to be considering the possibility that I might be telling the truth. There was a blob of something on my eyeglasses that had been annoying me since I’d gotten on the subway. I removed them in order to clean them with the lens cloth I always carried in my pocket. Junior looked into my eyes and his look of panic faded as his expression changed to astonishment.

  “Your eyes are my eyes,” he said. “Only older and . . . sadder.”

  I nodded.

  We got off at the first stop in the Bronx at Third Avenue and 138th Street. Junior lived on a street of red-brick brownstones that looked like an Edward Hopper painting—if a Hopper streetscape were surrounded by half a dozen towering public housing projects. I found my cell phone in my jacket pocket and showed it to Junior. He was impressed by its design—it reminded him of the communicators on Star Trek— although I’m not sure it helped prove my story. It could be powered up, but I would need to search for another decade to find a signal. As we walked to his apartment, Junior warned, “I have a dog.”

  I smiled. “Ravi.”

  “You’re good,” he said as got out his keys. Junior rented the bottom floor of a brownstone. The owner was a woman he’d met on a catering job who worked at House & Garden magazine. There were bars on the windows and two metal gates that had to be opened before you reached the front door. I had Junior look carefully to see if anyone had tried to break in. Everything appeared to be normal, and Junior bent down to pick up his mail off the floor. We decided it was safe when we heard Ravi panting behind the door, and I imagined him wagging his tail. He was a mutt, predominantly a golden retriever, and I was eager to see him again. In twelve years he would have to be put down due to kidney failure. Taylor and I had both cried uncontrollably at the vet’s.

  When the bolt turned and the door opened, Ravi’s tail wagged rapidly and he barked once at Junior. Then his tail stopped moving and he curiously sniffed my legs. His tail began thrashing once more, and he jumped up on me, then got down and ran over to Junior, and then ran back to me again.

  Junior turned on a light. “He likes you. And he doesn’t like everyone.”

  “He knows me.”

  “Oh, right.” Junior opened the back door to let Ravi out in the yard. “Would you get me a beer?” he asked.

  “A beer?”

  I forgot that I still drank in 1986.

  “It’s in the fridge. Have one. Don’t worry. It’s light beer.” He called Ravi’s name once and he ran outside.

  I wasn’t concerned with the calories but with the alcohol. Quitting drinking had been the hardest thing I’d ever done. I could never show my face at another meeting if I became my own enabler.

  “You’ll have to get it yourself. I don’t drink.”

  Junior glanced through the mail he’d grabbed. “It’s just one beer,” he said.

  “That’s how it starts! First it’s one beer, then two, then you move on to three Dewar’s and soda after work. Then you switch to vodka gimlets and pretty soon your days and nights are measured in cocktail hours.”

  Junior stared at me as if he thought I’d been drinking. “Does that mean I become an alcoholic?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “But when you quit, you stay sober.”

  I wanted to reassure him that there were problems in his future that he could handle successfully.

  He shook his head and opened the fridge and took out a green bottle of Rolling Rock. “Well, that news makes me need a drink,” he said before twisting off the cap. “Are you sure you don’t want something?”

  “Just a glass of water.”

  Junior opened a cupboard and got out a glass while I looked around. I couldn’t believe I’d lived in such a small space. It was one longish room that was almost filled by my American Empire sleigh bed. My first boyfriend in Buffalo had been an antiques dealer and he’d sold me the bed for three hundred dollars. There was also a matching Empire dresser, a cheap end table topped with a TV, a round white Formica kitchen table with four matching chairs, and a futon that looked like it had grounds for a medical malpractice lawsuit for a botched sofa-to-bed operation.

  I removed my shirt and pointed to a bumpy scar-ridge on my right shoulder.

  “This is where we got six stitches after we went pool-hopping with Tommy Mattea. We slipped trying to hop over a chain-link fence.”

  “That’s pretty impressive.” His eyes glanced at the scar but focused on my shoulders and chest. “How long will it take us to get those muscles?”

  “Not as long as you think.”

  “Now I hope you are me because I want that chest.”

  “You’re getting there,” I mumbled. Junior looked me over carefully, inspecting me like a rental car customer who’s checking his vehicle for nicks and dents before leaving the lot. I quickly put my shirt back on to hide the scar on my lower back.

  In 2004, I’d had a malignant melanoma removed. At first, my doctor thought that the cancer had spread, but it hadn’t. Taylor had been incredibly thoughtful and supportive when he heard my news. “Don’t worry. We’ll get through this.” It had taken me a year to fully recover from the intensive chemotherapy. Supposedly I was fine, but after you turn forty, you began to suspect that you’re always in remission from some cause of death. It rattled my confidence about breaking up with Taylor when I recalled with gratitude how considerate he had been through the devastating blows of my father’s and Carol’s deaths and my cancer.

  It’s frequently claimed—and we all hope it’s true—that facing death will be revelatory. Insight will be a form of compensation: you’ll learn the secret of life shortly before you go belly-up. But it’s really a leap of faith to expect people’s brains to function better than they have for their entire lives merely because they’ve just had the shit scared out of them.

  Cheney’s had four heart attacks—he’s faced his own mortality so often that he could pick out the Angel of Death from a police lineup. But after four near-death experiences, the vice president has exhibited no profound philosophical insight or transformative change of heart. In fact, Cheney’s renowned for his lack of compassion, remorse, or even doubt about anything.

  Receiving a “you’re gonna die-agnosis” hadn’t actually made me a better person, although it did change me. What gradually began to infuriate me was that malignant cells multiplying was considered an illness, but when people turned malignant and lost the ability to feel empathy for others, it was considered a formula for winning elections and governing. Most of Taylor’s Republican friends considered it a form of “tough love” to tell shoeless people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. My illness instilled in me one simple goal: you should try to go through life being less selfish than a cancer cell. If you can’t do that then you’re evil and an asshole.

  Junior opened a ba
g of tortilla chips and offered me some.

  “No thanks,” I said.

  He washed his first chip down with a swig of beer.

  “How old are you?” he asked.

  “Forty-six.”

  He didn’t flinch or gasp, which I took as a compliment. His eyes crept up to the top of my head and his smile faded.

  “When will I lose the rest of my hair?”

  “In your thirties.”

  “They don’t have a cure for baldness twenty years from now?”

  “No. Not yet.”

  “Maybe we should use your time machine to go to a drugstore a hundred years in the future. I bet the cure will be sold over the counter.”

  “There are worse things than going bald. I don’t look so bad.”

  Suddenly Junior shouted, “I don’t have AIDS!”

  He obviously made the connection that if I was alive in 2006 then he probably wasn’t HIV positive.

  “No.”

  “I can’t believe it. I’ve been so worried.”

  That was one painful memory I’d never forgotten.

  “You recently went to get tested and then found out your results were inconclusive,” I said. “The doctor said you had to be retested. You’ve been afraid to go back and pick up the results.”

  “It’s been a fucking nightmare.”

  “I know.”

  Junior smiled and said, “Right.”

  I’d never regarded my youth as particularly hard or tragic, but most of my friends died of AIDS during my first ten years in New York. Every morning on the subway reading the New YorkTimes felt like I was reading my own breaking obituary. I’d read another depressing story about the demise of finding a quick cure, stubbing my eyes on the word “gay,” as the newspaper always wrote it then, quarantined within quotation marks as if the editors wanted to prevent the word from infecting the rest of the English language.

  As Junior’s relief sank in, he began pacing the apartment. “What do I do for a living? What’s my boyfriend like? Do I still live in New York? Am I happy?”

  It occurred to me that this was getting complicated, and both of us might be getting in over our heads.

  “I’m not sure how much I should tell you. Because if I tell you about your future, your foreknowledge could alter it.”

  “How?”

  “Let’s say you have a boyfriend—and you do. Well, if I tell you who he is, you might react differently when the two of you eventually meet. You might be too initially confident and that might come off as smug to your boyfriend and the spark between you two might never be struck.”

  “Oh, Jesus. You won’t have sex with me and now you won’t tell me about my future. We need to alter the future so I don’t become so overly cautious.”

  “You’ve read enough time travel stories to know that I could be right.”

  “How come you’re not attracted to me? Am I too skinny?”

  “No. I’m not attracted to you because you’re me. And you have to quit thinking of yourself as a geek. From my vantage point, everyone looks good in their twenties, at least in comparison with their middle-aged selves. But please don’t become conceited.”

  “Then how come no one’s interested in me? I haven’t had sex since Halloween.”

  It was June and I must have made a face.

  “Even you’re appalled.”

  “Being sexy isn’t just about how you look, it’s how you behave. You need to be confident.”

  “Well, I’d be more confident if I wasn’t the first gay man in history to be rejected by himself.”

  “Do you really want to make out with yourself ?”

  “Yeah, why not?”

  “It’s weird.”

  “It’s as close to my twins fantasy as I’ll ever get.”

  I gave him a condescending smile.

  “It’s not any weirder than masturbation when you think about it,” he added. “And that’s universally beloved.”

  “You should respect my feelings,” I said.

  “And you should respect mine.” He grabbed my right hand and placed it on his crotch. He was hard. I laughed.

  “Now you’re laughing at my dick? You’re literally a self-hating homosexual.”

  “In this case that’s actually a sign of good mental health.”

  “You know, you’re the first guy I’ve ever brought back here.”

  “And in a way, you still came home alone.”

  “Thanks for pointing that out. That really helps my self-esteem you’re trying to build up.”

  Asking someone to come to your apartment in the South Bronx was a deal-breaker in 1986. The general attitude among gay men was if you have to leave Manhattan to get laid, you might as well keep going and head back to Ohio or Kentucky.

  I swallowed hard. “There’s something we need to talk about.”

  The full import of what I was about to do made me pause. I was replacing one burden of mortality with another. Instead of worrying about his dying of AIDS, Junior would worry about his sister killing herself. His vigilance over her might poison their relationship, and the weight of that knowledge might even cause Junior to become depressed. But Carol’s death was the worst thing that had ever happened to me and would be the worse thing to ever happen to him. Junior didn’t deserve that.

  “It’s about Carol.” I stopped to take a breath. Junior looked so innocent. “In fifteen years, she’s going to kill herself.”

  His brown eyes clouded with pain. “No,” he said, as the terror in his eyes registered that I was telling the truth. His body shuddered slightly. I felt despicable. I’d made him envision something that he never would have imagined. His face abruptly flushed with fury.

  “Jesus Christ, you are the most depressing person I’ve ever met! First you make me feel that my life will suck, and now you’re telling me my sister’s life will suck even worse. “

  “My life doesn’t suck.”

  “You’re bald, you’re broke, and you’re dumping your boyfriend. Sounds bad to me.”

  “That’s not how I think of myself. I’m pretty happy and successful, and you will be too.”

  “Wanna bet?”

  “I have a decent job. I have friends. I’m close to my family. I’m healthy.”

  I didn’t mention my recent cancer scare. Telling him that would muddle my story.

  “I’m forty-six and can still give guys in their twenties a boner.”

  Junior’s cheeks became rosier.

  “I also have a sense of humor and I’m adventurous. I’m actually one of the happiest guys I know.”

  I was telling the truth. I had experienced several devastatingly horrible events in my life: I’d endured a decade where I and every gay man in America felt like Tom Sawyer witnessing his own funeral thousands of times, and yet I still thought of my twenties as incredibly exciting and fun. I’d lived through my father’s sad death by alcoholism and my sister’s devastating suicide, survived cancer, and still thought of my life as happy. I didn’t understand why but I still felt lucky. It wasn’t denial, because I had suffered. The only thing I could think of was that my double helixes must function like mattress springs, since I seemed to be very resilient.

  Junior sat down on the bed and stared at the floor. His sadness made me feel close to despair. Even with a second chance to change my life, I still didn’t know what I was doing.

  “I’m sorry to be telling you this. I’m worried that knowing this will fuck you up. Or fuck up your relationship with Carol. But I think you might be able to prevent her death. I couldn’t go back to my time without trying to prevent it. Wouldn’t you do the same thing?”

  Junior nodded. “Yes.”

  He stood up and removed his dress shirt and hung it on a hanger in order to get one more day of wear out of it. He wore a white T-shirt underneath. His eyes met mine.

  “Why did she do it?”

  “It’s kind of complicated, as you’d expect.” I tried to think of where I should begin. I had several theories,
but they’d require quite a bit of explanation. The digital clock on the floor read 1:07. “Let’s talk in the morning. We shouldn’t now. It’s too late. I just want you to be on the lookout for her depression. You have to really let her know that you’ll be there for her.”

  “You’re leaving me to handle all of this?”

  “Well, yeah. I could be yanked back to the future at any moment. I won’t be here.”

  “You’re here now. And no one’s rescued you yet.”

  “I know. Thanks for reminding me.”

  “Hey, bad news goes both ways.”

  “You can handle this.”

  “Don’t dump all this on me. We should both go see Carol. We’ll convince her that you’re me. Well, me as a chrome-dome.”

  “At least I’m not pencil-necked.”

  “I’m getting some muscles.” He raised his right arm and flexed. An egg-shaped bicep popped up. Not bad for someone who’d only been working out for six months.

  “You’ve got to help me with this. Then you can go back to breaking up with your boyfriend. And let me just add: I’m really looking forward to being single at forty-six.”

  “Don’t tell me how to run my life.”

  I’d said it seriously, but we both began to laugh.

  “We can fly out to California,” Junior said. “I get time off during the summer.”

  The art gallery shut down for two weeks every summer. Sylvia still paid me, which was incredibly generous.

  I tried to recall what airport security was like in 1986.

  “Do they make you show ID at the airport?”

  “They’ll want to see your driver’s license.”

  We were silent for a moment as we imagined trying to board a plane with a driver’s license issued in 2001.

  “We could drive,” I suggested. “It would take about a week.”

  “I’ve never been out west.”

  Junior took off his undershirt and undid his belt buckle. It was shocking to see that I had no body fat then. “Do you think we’ll be followed by your vice president?”

  “I don’t know. Hopefully he doesn’t know I’m with you.”